The First Chinese American

The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo

SCOTT D. SELIGMAN

Publication Year: 2013

Chinese in America endured abuse and discrimination in the late nineteenth century, but they had a leader and a fighter in Wong Chin Foo (1847–1898), whose story is a forgotten chapter in the struggle for equal rights in America. The first to use the term "Chinese American," Wong defended his compatriots against malicious scapegoating and urged them to become Americanized to win their rights. A trailblazer and a born showman who proclaimed himself China's first Confucian missionary to the United States, he founded America's first association of Chinese voters and testified before Congress to get laws that denied them citizenship repealed. Wong challenged Americans to live up to the principles they freely espoused but failed to apply to the Chinese in their midst. This evocative biography is the first book-length account of the life and times of one of America's most famous Chinese—and one of its earliest campaigners for racial equality.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Preface

In the many months I have lived with Wong Chin Foo, reading what he wrote and what he read, studying what admirers and critics said about him during his lifetime and since, tracking his movements and corresponding with his descendants, I have often smiled to myself in admiration and appreciation. Had he not died more than half a ...

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest thanks to several scholars who have contributed immeasurably to this project by reviewing the manuscript, making helpful and challenging suggestions for its improvement, and encouraging me throughout its the Harvard-Yenching Library, who in many important ways played ...

Wong Chin Foo Chronology

Dramatis Personae

1. The Arid Land of Heathenism (1847–67)

The single most important choice in the life of Wong Chin Foo—the
one most responsible for who he eventually became—was not his
own. It was, in fact, made on his behalf when he was a teenager by a
pious American ...

2. An Abbreviated American Education (1868–70)

Tens of thousands of “Chinamen,” as they were called then, had already landed on America’s shores by the time Wong Sa Kee arrived in late 1867. Chinese had begun appearing in significant numbers just after news reached China of the 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California. By 1860, the immigrant Chinese in the United ...

3. The Timber from Which Conspirators Are Made (1871–72)

Wong does not appear to have had any intention of taking up missionary work when he landed in his native country in early 1871. His first order of business was to return to Shandong and take a wife. He was already 24: it was past time. He chose—or, more likely, had chosen for him—a woman named Liu Yu San, who had been a student and, ...

4. Soiled Doves (1873–74)

Shortly after the SS MacGregor dropped anchor off San Francisco’s Black Point Battery on the evening of September 9, 1873, a large envelope was smuggled ashore and quietly delivered to the office of the chief of police. No one saw who brought it. The envelope contained a letter written in English on two pieces of rice paper in the ...

5. A Hare-Brained, Half-Crazy Man (1873–74)

The San Francisco Chronicle profile, “A Remarkable Chinaman,” was measure of nationwide renown.1 It provided a fairly comprehensive, if somewhat embellished, summary of his life to date, including the MacGregor affair and his revolutionary activities in, and flight from, China. Connecticut’s Hartford Courant published it on October 7, ...

6. America’s First Confucian Missionary (1874)

After the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, large numbers of Chinese in America were put out of work. This occurred, regrettably, just as the country was on the brink of a nationwide depression. As Chinese immigrants began to look for other employ-West. Their willingness to work for low wages put them at odds with ...

7. A Most Delightful Dish of Chow Chow (1875–79)

The peripatetic Wong delivered variations on the Boston speech
for the next several years in the East and the Midwest, as well as
presentations on the domestic life, manners, and customs of the
Chinese. He remained in New England for the balance of ...

8. A Terror to the Chinese Community (1879–82)

The “Chinese question” continued to preoccupy the nation as the
1870s progressed. At the urging of California politicians, and
with that state’s six electoral votes squarely in their sights in what
promised to be a close election, both major political parties ...

9. The Chinese American (1883)

On May 8, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur, who had succeeded
James A. Garfield after the latter’s assassination the previous year,
signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law. The act contained bad
news for both future hopeful immigrant laborers from China and...

10. Wiping Out the Stain (1883–85)

With the publication of the Chinese American, Wong’s notoriety grew.
He was often sought out to speak for the Chinese community, a role
the quotable editor willingly embraced. When Dr. Charles Kaemmerer,
former sanitary inspector for the city, accused Chinatown residents ...

11. I Shall Drive Him Back to His Sand Lots (1883)

If any one individual personified the anti-Chinese movement in the
United States, it was surely San Francisco’s Denis Kearney. A bigot,
a demagogue, and a gifted public speaker, Kearney rose to national
prominence in the late 1870s when he became ...

12. Pigtails in Politics (1884–86)

After the passage of the Exclusion Act in 1882, it was abundantly
clear that America’s Chinese had few friends in the political firmament.
Planks supporting exclusion in the platforms of both major
parties in the 1880 presidential election had signaled a broad ...

13. Chop Suey (1884–86)

The Chinese American never offered Wong a significant source
of income, if indeed it provided him any salary at all. Its demise,
however, once again raised the question of how he was to earn a
living. Money, Wong claimed, was never a strong motivator ...

14. Why Am I a Heathen? (1887)

Wong’s thinking about religion underwent a remarkable metamorphosis
in the 1880s. In the decade since he had begun his attack
on the missionaries in China and declared himself a missionary in
reverse, he had ...

15. Fifty Cents a Pound (1887)

The month after Yan Phou Lee’s article appeared, Wong got an opportunity
for a rematch with his nemesis, Denis Kearney. Four years after
their initial confrontation, Kearney, a political has-been by this time,
was back on the East Coast. He was trying to gin up support ...

16. The Chinese in New York (1887–89)

During the late 1880s, Wong was a pillar of New York Chinatown
society and served informally as one of its ambassadors to the wider
world. He feted Excise Commissioner William S. Andrews at a dinner
in Chinatown in November 1886. Half a year ...

17. I Have Always Been a Republican (1888–89)

Writing for the American audience was important to Wong, because
public attitudes toward the Chinese would have to soften before
meaningful change could be effected in exclusion policies. But as he
began to turn his attention to politics, he realized that addressing ...

18. I’ll Cut Your Head Off If You Write Such Things (1888–91)

Stamping out vice among America’s Chinese was a cause to which
Wong had been committed for many years. As he saw it, giving up
destructive, Old World customs like opium smoking was part and
parcel of becoming ...

19. The Only New Yorker Without a Country (1891)

The Chinese Exclusion Act not only halted most Chinese immigration,
it also plunged into limbo the status of those few Chinese who
had naturalized before its passage. After 1882, Wong had to endure
repeated insinuations that his ...

20. The Chinese Equal Rights League (1892)

Neither the Chinese Exclusion Act nor any of the other measures
adopted to keep the Chinese out had proven entirely successful in
foiling the laws of supply and demand. Powerful economic forces
continued to conspire to unite Chinese workers ...

21. Is It Then a Crime to Be a Chinaman? (1893)

For Congress to repeal the Geary Act, a new bill would be required,
and the man to introduce it was Congressman John Forrester Andrew,
a Massachusetts Democrat. Elected in 1888, Andrew was a Harvardeducated
attorney who ...

22. An Ardent Worker for Justice (1893)

By the end of 1891, it looked as though Wong’s decade-long dream
of establishing a Chinese theater in New York was finally about to
be realized. He had secured enough financial backing to lease space
in the basement and first floor...

23. False Starts (1894–95)

Shortly after the Columbian Exposition closed, Wong returned to
New York. With his departure, the second incarnation of his Chinese
American newspaper died. In December 1893, several papers around
the country carried a tiny item in which it was revealed ...

24. The American Liberty Party (1896)

The Midwest was where the major parties planned to choose their candidates
for the presidential election of 1896. The principal campaign
issues were expected to be economic ones, including free coinage of
silver and ...

25. A Letter from My Friends in America (1894–97)

Becoming Chinese American implied making a commitment to the
United States and adopting American ways, but Wong had never
asserted that it required turning one’s back on China. He himself
certainly never did so. And while his knowledge ...

26. Citizenship for Americanized Chinese (1897)

Wong was frenzied and unfocused at the end of 1896, and probably
exhausted. He was, after all, publishing a newspaper, establishing a
house of worship, running a civil rights organization, and planning
the overthrow of the Manchus, all at the same ...

27. When the World Came to Omaha (1897–98)

Wong had had nothing but praise for Chicago’s 1893 Columbian
Exposition and the men who had stepped in to plan, finance, and
build a Chinese village, after the Manchu government declined to
participate. He had written about ...

28. I Do Not Like Chinese Ways, Nor Chinamen Any More (1898)

On June 20, 1898, after nearly three weeks at sea, Wong disembarked
in Hong Kong. It had been 25 years since he had last set foot in Asia.
He had several reasons for making the trip when he did. First, he
believed he was owed money by his erstwhile ...

Afterword

...decades upon America’s stage and then was heard no more. Few of the institutions that he Wong Chin Foo was a player who strutted and fretted his three
decades upon America’s stage and then was heard no more. Few of
the institutions that he built survived him; those that lived on did not
do so for long. After his death ...

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